Kickstarter Stats

Kickstarter Stats: Analysis

In case you didn't notice, I have quite a few pages of stats about the top ten most funded Kickstarter film projects and Fund Anything "Road Hard". Here are my thoughts about the various stats. I'll concentrate on "Veronica Mars" because it is this site's reason d'etre and "Spike Lee Joint" because it is the 09er of Kickstarter film projects.

Notes:

I estimated the number of new Kickstarter members by counting the number of backers who joined the month the Kickstarter project launched, and who had the project as the first item in their list of backed projects.

I estimated the number of female and male backers by taking the top 200 female and 200 male names, and counting how many backers had those names. These female vs male stats are not 100% accurate: many backers use aliases instead of their real names, some names are unisex, etc.

I have less stats on "Road Hard" than the 10 other Kickstarter projects because FundAnything.com has less stats than Kickstarter

Veronica Mars

$5,702,153!

"Veronica Mars" got a lot of press for raising over $5 million. But $5 million isn't he whole story. Let's take a closer look at the stats.

"Veronica Mars" was able to reach its $2 million goal on its first day. Out of the 11 projects on the first day, "Veronica Mars" is first in amount pledged ($2,351,920) and number of backers (37,968), but ninth in average pledge ($62).

80% of the money raised for "Veronica Mars" comes from pledges under $500, 44% from pledges under $50. Out of the 11 projects, "Veronica Mars" is third in terms of percent of pledges under $100 and percent of pledges under $50.

How did "Veronica Mars" raise over $5 million despite the fact the individual pledges were comparatively small?

91,585 Backers!

The reason why "Veronica Mars" was able to raise SO. MUCH. MONEY. is because it has SO. MANY. BACKERS. What VM fans lack in money, they make up for in mass devotion.

"Veronica Mars" brought more new members to Kickstarter than the other 9 projects combined (56,506 vs. 53,252).

Out of the 10 Kickstarter projects, "Veronica Mars" has the second largest percentage of new members (62%).

Women vs Men

Since the lead character in "Veronica Mars" is female, the show is viewed as a "female show." Out of the 11 projects, "Veronica Mars" is the most balanced in terms of gender (59.3% female vs 40.7% male). The other projects skew heavily to one sex.

An example of how male-skewed the other films are,
"Veronica Mars" has more female backers than the other 10 projects combined (37,092 vs 19,960).

Even though "Veronica Mars" has the second lowest percentage of male backers (40.7%), it has more male backers (25,406) than any of the other 10 projects.

Other

For "Veronica Mars", the three days with the highest average daily pledge were (March 27, March 28, and March 29). Those three days are the days that the rewards were opened up to international backers.

"Spike Lee Joint" has thirty $10,000 backers. "Road Hard" has nineteen $10,000+ backers. "Veronica Mars" limited itself to one $10,000 reward. One has to wonder much money "Veronica Mars" could have raised if it had an unlimited number of $10,000 rewards.

Spike Lee

After the success of "Veronica Mars" and Zach Braff's Kickstarter projects, Spike Lee started his own Kickstarter project.

Out of the 11 projects, "Spike Lee Joint" is ninth in number of backers (6,421), but fourth in amount pledge ($1,418,910).

While "Veronica Mars" is an example of what the masses can do when many contribute a little, "Spike Lee Joint" is an example of what a few can do when they contribute a lot.